Month: April 2023

Enlarge / I wish I had more games installed for iPad-on-the-couch photo purposes, but I just don't keep that many games on my drive at once! (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Nvidia's GameStream had one job, the one in its name: stream games from the Nvidia graphics card inside your PC to the Nvidia Shield hooked up to your TV (or, back in the day, a Shield tablet). It did this job fairly well, making setup simple and optimizing games with some custom stream-smoothing. Now Nvidia is removing GameStream from Shield devices—but an even better DIY game-streaming solution is already available. Let's take a look at it and talk to the developers about why and how they made it.

Nvidia's GameStream was a key part of the hardware company's pitch for its Shield products. (credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia is done with local streaming

Nvidia says a Shield update arriving this month will make it so "the GameStream feature will no longer be available in app." If you try to skip the Shield update, GameStream will still stop working at some point (and possibly be removed from the GeForce Experience app in Windows). In the meantime, trying to dodge that update means not using GeForce Now, one of Nvidia's recommended replacements, on your Shield and missing out on all the other update fixes and features that arrive with system updates.

If you're a Shield owner, like I am, this stinks. Shield devices have merits of their own, receiving the longest and most consistent stream of updates of any Android/Google TV device ever released. They're still perfectly functional as stream boxes (and even more appealing if Google lands an NFL package). But a big benefit of having both a Shield and a GeForce graphics card will soon be shunted.

Enlarge / Wolf Point Creek is likely the most-well-studied glacier-fed stream in the world. (credit: Elizabeth via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0))

Pushing off from the dock on a boat called the Capelin, Sandy Milner’s small team of scientists heads north, navigating through patchy fog past a behemoth cruise ship. As the Capelin slows to motor through humpback whale feeding grounds, distant plumes of their exhalations rise from the surface on this calm July morning. Dozens of sea otters dot the water. Lolling on backs, some with babes in arms, they turn their heads curiously as the boat speeds by. Seabirds and seals speckle floating icebergs in this calm stretch of Alaska’s Glacier Bay.

Some two hours later, the craft reaches a rocky beach where Wolf Point Creek meets the sea. The creek is a relatively new feature on the landscape: Land at its mouth first became ice-free in the 1940s due to the melting and retreat of a glacier. It took shape through the 1970s, fed by a mountain lake that slowly formed as an isolated chunk of glacier ice slowly melted. Wolf Point Creek is special because almost its entire life span — from the first, sparse trickles melting out under the ice edge to a mature stream ecosystem teeming with aquatic life, from tiny midge larvae to small fish, and with willows and alder weaving along its edges — is known in intimate detail, its history painstakingly documented.

Milner, a stream ecologist at the University of Birmingham in the UK, has returned almost annually to this spot since the 1970s to catalog how life — particularly aquatic invertebrates — has arrived, thrived and changed over time. He was here to observe meager midges in 1977 and to spot a hundred prospecting pink salmon in 1989. A decade later, his team cataloged 10,000 of the fish spawning in Wolf Point Creek.